


the game

by emorosadiaz



Series: hey, soul sister [2]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Drama, Endgame, F/M, Female Friendship, Fix-It, Infinity War, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Canon Compliant, Romance, Soul Stone, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-16
Updated: 2019-05-16
Packaged: 2020-03-06 06:41:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18845716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emorosadiaz/pseuds/emorosadiaz
Summary: *Endgame spoilers*The rules of the game are simple: Gamora has one stone while Thanos has five, but hers is the most powerful, so she can restart the game when she loses.“Like a video game,” Peter supplies, eyes far too bright for someone who’s lived this life a hundred times over or more with her. “You just have to keep playing until you win, even though it means starting over every time.”





	1. de-ja-vu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oof here we ARE lads....a fic i've been meandering through for the past year, since i watched infinity war last spring...we going places now

She comes to the same way every time: coughing, shivering, and alone.

It’s lonely until it’s not—until someone comes to her with a way off this forsaken planet she’s come to despise.

Nine times out of ten, he is the one who gets to her first, cradling her head in his lap and holding her closely to share what warmth he can spare.

(One time out of ten, no one comes, and the game is over before it can begin.)

Her shivers never slow quickly, ten times out of ten, that is a guarantee, with certainty, every time, even if she never remembers it on the spot.

* * *

She only remembers it between games, back in the world she’s come to recognize as the prison to which her soul is confined until she is victorious.

“You are not a prisoner,” her younger self tells her, eyes twinkling with an uncomfortably large amount of power. “His sacrifice was not worthy; _you_ were worthy, you are in control.”

The sight of her child lips forming such ambitious words unsettles her all times out of a hundred, just like her body’s shivers, but she nods, anyway, understanding.

“You just need to win,” the child continues, studying her.

“I just need to win,” she echoes herself—if that’s even herself at all.

* * *

The rules of the game are simple: she has one stone while he has five, but hers is the most powerful, so she can restart the game when she loses.

“Like a video game,” her partner supplies, eyes far too bright for someone who’s lived this life a hundred times over or more with her. “You just have to keep playing until you win, even though it means starting over every time.”

He, like she, only has access to this knowledge of their existence—caught in a loop of tragedy under the guise of “losing”—in between games, when she’s lost again and must reset the pieces on the game board. The stone allowed him access to her world of control after some fifty-odd resets, because he being he started to inexplicably feel the ripples of previous attempts in his mortal life.

“Because we’re basically soulmates, Gamora,” he’d say. “Soulmates, Soul Stone…it’s _gotta_ be connected.”

(She repeats those words—all she knows of this outer world during her mortal lives—in his voice, like a mantra over and over in her head during the worst games—the ones where she loses him before losing herself and she can do nothing but watch.)

Winning the game is hard when one must play blindly, unknowing of their circumstances until they’ve already lost. She tells this to the stone.

“You are still mortal,” her child self says, looking between her and Peter. “Mortals cannot bear such weight on their minds.”

She sighs. Peter squeezes her hand.

“We’ll get ‘em next time,” he says, trying to reassure her.

* * *

There are rigid precedents in each game that, no matter the circumstances, can never be defied.

The first she notices is the cold during her awakening on Vormir each and every time, how the chill squeezes her lungs, her limbs still rebuilding themselves but not quickly enough. It isn’t until Peter comes and warms her up that she starts to feel again—but his presence is not one of the certainties.

What _is_ certain is that no one is aware of the game—the loop they’re caught in that repeats automatically upon Gamora’s death.

She sets the game up carefully every time, before returning to her physical body and blissful ignorance. Just as she—unintentionally, in her panicked grief—handpicked Peter to be with her after Thanos’ first snap, she places everyone back in their respectful spots in the universe, from where they’d been so cruelly reduced to dust, each and every one by hand with the care she knows Thanos lacked when he dared to touch them in the first place.

(One night, during a stolen moment on the Benatar, parked on Titan, Peter confesses that the brief time he spent contemplating a life without her, in the time between learning of her death and succumbing to death himself, before the resurrection, was the worst time of his life.

She says, surely, there are worse things—losing his mother, losing Yondu, being betrayed by Ego.

He shakes his head and says this was the worst, because it was the one thing he’d promised himself he’d never let happen, with a certainty she later finds to rival that of the rules of the game. Thanos is the monster in the closet he was most prepared to confront and fight out of everything he’s been through, yet is the hardest one to overcome.

This, Gamora says, holding his hand, is what overcoming it looks like, though she is not quite sure of the full extent and weight of her words.

What she is sure of is that, should she be confronted with the same choice as Peter, between him and the universe, she owes it to him to make the same decision he’d tried to, per her request.)

(In between the games, however, when he sits with her to strategize or twirls her around to the beat of whatever song he’s humming, she finds that certainty wavering, because the game only restarts upon _her_ death, not his. Should he die before a victory, his death is final, unless—)

(She forbids herself from contemplating beyond “unless.”)

* * *

It isn’t until what she later estimates to be the two hundred and fiftieth game that she notices the certainties and rules of the game unraveling.

The man Peter calls the wizard and she calls the doctor but they both know to literally be called _Strange_ indicates that he knows what’s happening, can feel it in his being.

“I am connected to the Time Stone,” he says. “I can feel rifts in time.”

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“You did,” he says. “And you will.”

“I don’t understand,” she repeats.

“You are our key to victory,” he says, then, after a beat, spares a shrug vaguely aimed in Peter’s direction beside her. “And him, too, I guess.”

“I have a _name_ ,” Peter huffs, crossing his arms, and somehow, someway, Gamora feels this is not the first time she has witnessed this exact interaction.

* * *

“On Earth,” Peter says as they sift through their weapons on the Benatar, “it’s called ‘de-ja-vu.’ I think it’s some other language—French? Not a lot of French people in Missouri.

“Anyway,” he hands a blaster to her, “it’s when you feel like you’ve already experienced something before. Like, if you feel like you’ve had our current conversation before, at some other time or place, but can’t quite remember it, then that’s pretty much it.”

Gamora places the blaster beside the others they’d deemed good enough to share with the others, pursing her lips.

“I think I’m having the de-ja-vu,” she murmurs.

“Man, while we were even _talking_ about having de-ja-vu?” He shakes his head, leaning with both hands on the bin. “You just broke my brain.”

Which is something she recalls doing before.

* * *

“Do you not tire of this?” Gamora dares to ask him before one game, somewhere around three hundred. “This repetition? Never winning? Dying over and over?”

“It’s not like I _remember_ everything while we’re alive,” Peter says, settling beside her on the strange water surface, legs pressed up against hers. “I’m just glad we’re together.”

“Do you not tire of me for company?” she says, scrunching her nose, because even as much as she loves Peter, there are times that the reality of it all—him being her only companion in this—weighs heavily on her mind, exhausting her, and she wishes for that same connection with the others, too.

“You’re literally my favorite person,” he says, but then shrugs. “I mean, I wish it didn’t have to be just the two of us knowing what exactly is going on, but it’s better than being alone in this, right?”

“It is,” she tells him, because the first fifty games were, in comparison, much more dreadful and terrifying. “I hate this game.”

“Now _I’m_ getting de-ja-vu,” he teases, bumping her knee, and she mirrors his smile.

“As am I.” Her smile fades. “I hate him.”

His smile fades as well. “Yeah. Me, too.”

* * *

“Hey, Soul-Stone-kid-Gamora,” Peter says after the next game and Gamora requested a minute to quietly gather herself in private—practically impossible in the Soul World, where only two souls apparently reside. She pictures him bending down to talk to her child self, in that kind way Peter talks to anyone he deems worthy but small. “What can we do to actually win next time?”

“That’s for Gamora to determine,” she answers, and Gamora can feel her stare burning into the back of her head. “And for you to help her accomplish.”

“While I agree that Gamora is the brains between us, isn’t there anything else she can do with your power when she’s, like, alive?”

Her child self does not respond at first, prompting Gamora to turn toward them out of curiosity. Surely enough, Peter is crouched before her child self.

“This is already using all of our power,” the child says softly, as if breaking difficult news to him. “It’s up to her to defeat Thanos with it.”

Peter sighs, falling back on his haunches, as if accepting defeat in his line of questioning. Gamora picks at the already raw skin of her knuckles, thinking back to what went wrong in the last game, how it compares to the games before that, how can they change the next one—

“When Gamora fell,” the child says, “we saw she was worthy of being saved. All we did was, simply, save her. That worth alone is enough to defeat Thanos; she just needed a safety net.” She pauses, sizing Peter up. “And you.”

“At least I made the list,” Peter jokes, but Gamora can’t bear to watch them anymore.

* * *

Three times out of fifty, Gamora doesn’t see Peter between games.

Instead, she sees _him_ —her rival, chuckling from the other side of the board.

And she is a child again, small and so, so scared, yet determined and ambitious.

“I won’t lose to you,” she says to him, clenching her shaking fists.

“You’ll never win,” Thanos says, stepping closer to her. “We’ll just be stuck here forever. Unless you concede, little one.”

It’s tempted her before—the idea of giving in, letting Thanos have his way, retiring to the Soul World permanently. She would be trapped there, cut off from everyone besides Peter, but is that the worst possible outcome?

(It is, her adult voice insists in her mind, because it’d cost half the universe, a half-universe filled with innocent families and friends and stars and other beautiful things.)

“I won’t,” she repeats to him—the monster in Peter’s metaphorical closet—and turns away, leaving him to prepare for their next game. “I will win. We will win.”

“Then let us continue to the next round.”

* * *

The worst part about playing a game with her father is that it’s a game until it’s not.

It’s not a game anymore when her close friends—her _family_ —fall victim to Thanos’ attacks, collapsing to piles of blood and bones and twigs.

It’s not a game anymore when Nebula’s ripped apart at the seams, oh-so-close to getting the gauntlet and ending things once and for all. No matter how much Gamora cradles her head in her lap and strokes her cheek, Nebula loses.

It’s not a game anymore when Thanos takes Gamora _and_ Peter in an attempt to re-retrieve the Soul Stone, which he’d lose to Gamora in the resurrection in every game—a certainty—and tortures Peter for the answers Thanos knows he doesn’t possess but Gamora does and Gamora can crack.

(Two times out of seventy-five, she dies with Peter, clinging to his body when Thanos delivers his final blow, yet it has a strange calm to it that watching Peter die or watching Peter watch her die don’t have.

The calmest losses are when Thanos obtains all the stones and snaps his fingers, and Peter’s fingers intertwined with hers start crumbling to dust and the deep orange glow, calling her back to her soul’s prison, starts to emit from her body. It’s in that final moment only that they are ever suddenly made aware—of their circumstances and the time that’s passed—as mortals.)

The worst games are when she loses everyone and everything, all before her eyes, not spared to a fate of dust but condemned to pain and torture, and all she can do is watch, bound by invisible chains.

Those games are the ones that she takes longest to reset from, and even then, the grief is strong enough to carry over into her mind when she reawakens on Vormir—when she’s supposed to have no recollection of the previous games or the fact that she’s her own pawn in a universe of her pawns, and she’s moved to tears and maybe ends the game before it can truly start by herself, with the too-balanced-knife wobbling in her hands before she brings it down to her skin like she wanted to in the first place.

(She tries not to think of the Peter Quills of those games, when she gives him the false hope of finding her alive, only for him to discover her corpse with a fresh, fatal wound.)

* * *

Snow drifts.

Her head’s resting against Peter’s chest, just over his heart, as he holds her upper body in his lap, rubbing her arms vigorously to warm her up. She watches specks of snow fall around them, some sticking to their arms and legs and others melting upon impact. She shivers—per the rules of the game.

Something of the game is in her mind, now, despite her mortal circumstances, and rather than close her eyes and relax into his grasp, she stares at the snow blankly.

“I love you,” he whispers to her, rubbing it into her arms with his hands but the snow keeps falling in the same pattern it always does and her breath catches.

“De-ja-vu,” she murmurs shakily. His hands stop abruptly.

“Wait—like the Terran ‘de-ja-vu’? When did you learn that?”

She presses her lips together. “I love you, too.”

* * *

There are worse things, she thinks, than being condemned to a time loop of death and destruction with her self-appointed soulmate, unbreakable until she can defeat her self-appointed father.

(Only one of those people who appointed himself to the position he holds in her life is doing a good job.)

When she wakes up shivering and confused and covered in snow, he appears to her minutes later, nine times out of ten, pulling her into his lap and trying to compensate for their separation with kisses and one continuous hug throughout.

Later, after that game, she may get caught up in the semantics of it all once more, how she’s playing a losing game because she has one stone and Thanos has five, but she also has a Peter and Thanos has none of those.

Thanos doesn’t need a Peter and that small, cynical, traitorous part of Gamora, installed by Thanos, insists that’s the strength he has that she lacks.

But the rest of her says, no, that’s exactly Thanos’ _weakness_ , because he has no Peter, and without a Peter, he can never truly win.

What is “truly winning”?

Gamora thinks it has something to do with being happy, and she doesn’t think Thanos has anything to do with that.

* * *

The strange-doctor-wizard tells her, “I know what you’re doing. I can feel it.”

She says, “I don’t understand.”

“You did and you will.”

“I don’t understand.”

Like clockwork, the whole thing. She feels it in her bones—the de-ja-vu.

But he challenges what she doesn’t know that she knows, and he says, “Thank you.”

She, after a pause in which she swallows a strange lump that’s suddenly formed in her throat, says, “I won’t lose.”

He says, “I know.”

* * *

One time many years ago, before the games, Peter had told her that rules were made to be broken.

At the time, she’d just rolled her eyes and he pulled her in for a kiss and everything was so okay it wasn’t fair—not to her now, at least.

(What she would give just to have those innocent, unfairly okay moments again.)

Now, though, she’s realizing that maybe he’d had a point, so—

“Peter,” she says, in honor of the fifth hundredth game, looking up at his face against the snowy background of Vormir, “we are caught in an endless time loop until I successfully kill Thanos.”

She breaks a rule.

His hands stop where they are on her arms, warming them up. Considering this is almost the fifth hundredth time he’s done this, she wonders how her skin isn’t raw.

“What?” is all he says, looking at her like she’s crazy, and that’s how she knows.

* * *

“Peter isn’t really playing these games with me,” she says to the stone after that game, predictably, ends in a loss, “is he?”

He’s not in the Soul World now.

He’s equal to everyone else: a piece on her side of the game board, that can be captured or removed by Thanos. 

Her child self meets her gaze calmly. “You are the one who truly possesses the power of the Soul Stone.”

“You tricked me and made me think he was with me all along.” Gamora steps closer. “Just so I could do what you wanted me to do.”

(Like so many others in her life, it seems.)

“It was your own doing,” she replies to Gamora. “You’re in control. You wanted him here, so you crafted an image of him to be here with you, perhaps unconsciously.”

“But…” She thinks of the time Peter had inexplicably remembered something she’d said in a game entirely separate from the one they’d been in at that time. “Peter _knew_.”

“He doesn’t know as much as you. He was right, after all; he’s your soulmate-of-sorts. You’re connected to one another. Love can, occasionally, defy the rules.”

Everything is shaky. The simple act of standing is suddenly challenging. Her fingers twitch at her sides, craving Peter’s absent hands. “I’ve been alone this whole time.”

“You had to learn how to control the power. That’s how you’re able to now break the rules.”

It only took five hundred practice games.

She gives a frustrated yell, sinking to a squat and burying her fingers in her hair on either side of her head. Everything _hurts_ , everything is so—

“Get a hold of yourself,” the stone says simply, her tone too eerie for a child’s voice. “You must beat Thanos and prevent him from abusing this power himself.”

The world starts to fade around her in that way it does before every game, but her mind is too scattered to set up the game board, pieces and characters and moments and dances and fights and hugs all swirling around her brain in one big mess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes i am making up my own rules for the soul stone and no i will not be taking any criticism on it ty


	2. no matter how many lives that i live

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yeah, this one isn't as long as the first chapter (neither is the third chapter) but we out here Trying to be multi-chap alright

This game is different.

This game, she starts somewhere else—somewhere long before the starting point outlined in the rules.

She’s on Xandar and the suns are bright and there’s some sticky fruit in her hand and the door beside her opens and—

“We had a deal, bro!” he yells, emerging from the door as it closes in his face.

She drops the fruit, fingers cramping and breath hitching and everything in her vision going suddenly blurry.

It’s been years; she doesn’t remember what she said or who spoke next but he’s looking at her expectantly and all she wants to do is cry.

“Peter Quill,” he says to her after a beat, as if this was one of those Terran movies he loves to watch and she’d just missed her line so he skips it and moves onto his next line. His eyes express the same interest in her they first had all those years—games—ago. “People call me Star-Lord.”

“No one calls you that,” she whispers, a twinge of humor in there _somewhere_ but it’s lost in the small catch in her voice and she throws her arms around him, hugging him tightly, silently begging for time to just _stop._

So, it does.

* * *

This time when she wakes up, her vision is temporarily blinded by orange, until a few blinks reveal Peter’s sleeping face before her. The blankets rest primarily over her on her side of the bed and the dull hum of the Qudrant fills the silence alongside Peter’s snores and it’s so mundane and simple and _hurts_.

She touches his cheek, her finger tips trailing down his skin, and resets the pieces again, with the same orange glow.

* * *

“You seem tired,” Nebula says, dry but concerned, eyeing her carefully. “You’re not dead anymore. You should be awake.”

Gamora smiles, ducking her head momentarily. “It’s a bit of a readjustment. A tiring one.”

“I’m not sure we have time to be tired,” Nebula says. “There is a war to be won.”

“You’re right.”

Silence falls over them.

“Gamora,” Nebula eventually murmurs, “are you sure you’re alright?”

Gamora presses her lips together. “I am okay as I can be, I suppose.”

Fear sparks across Nebula’s eyes for just a moment. She shakes her head. “I just have this strange feeling…almost as if we’ve been here before. And it ended badly.”

“A dream?” Gamora prompts quickly, hoping Nebula doesn’t notice the way her breath catches at her words, because maybe she can break rules now but she never thought the others could, too.

“I don’t know,” Nebula admits with her patented, frustrated scowl. “It feels real. And familiar. Almost like a distant memory.”

Gamora tries not to think of all the past Nebulas who had to grieve her death all over again—losing Gamora after finding her alive on Vormir. She resets the same game each time rather than abandoning it for a new board entirely, meaning the Nebula before her now is the same Nebula who’s lost to Thanos hundreds of times, though she doesn’t ( _shouldn’t_ ) remember it.

“Try to be optimistic,” Gamora says finally, placing a hand on Nebula’s shoulder. “We can win.”

(They don’t—not in this game.)

* * *

Somewhere around five hundred and fifty, she loses hope.

She continues playing the game; it’s her duty, to protect others to the best of her ability, even at the cost of her emotional well-being and sanity, as the sole bearer of interdimensional knowledge and the weight of her opponent’s expectations resting squarely upon her shoulders. Nothing ever changes, even when others echo sentiments from their past lives, strange ripples in the timeline that never amount to anything.

One game, she says, _fuck it_ , and screws with the foundations of everything, dividing up her own team, leaving Peter behind with the orb on that sunny day on Xandar.

(Only then does she learn, that, without the Guardians at her side, escaping Thanos is _actually_ impossible, because she dies much, much earlier on in this game.)

It’s not until the sixth hundredth game or so that she finds herself at one of the most repetitive points of the game in the heat of battle, Thanos momentarily distracted and incapacitated and Nebula just feet away, ready to pounce on the gauntlet and take it for her own.

(Gamora used to cry out to Nebula to run away, knowing what was to come in just a few moments. Now, she watches calmly, her sword falling to her side, because even if it meant the slightest chance at victory, a world without Nebula is never a world Gamora plans to stick around in for long.)

Instead, when Nebula should be the one to go for the gauntlet, she leaps _past_ it, toward Thanos’ head, her hands clenched in tight fists, ready to punch, and Peter circles around Thanos from his gauntlet-less hand to his gauntlet-clad hand, reaching his fingers out to it.

Gamora nearly drops her sword at the sight.

(Later, she catches Peter in passing—

“How did you know to cut around Thanos that way?” she asks.

Peter shrugs. “I dunno, it just seemed…less predictable?”

And though the ending to this timeline quickly becomes predictable, bodies and dust surrounding her, Gamora takes Peter’s words to heart.)

* * *

She must become less predictable.

So, she tries a different tactic.

After recharging in the Soul World, she has enough energy and power to reset the game board again.

But she doesn’t.

Instead, she sits back, thinking. Her child self studies her quietly for a moment, then approaches.

“You may start now,” she reminds.

But Gamora still does not move. “Not yet.”

Her child self raises an eyebrow. Gamora doesn’t budge. If this stone is _hers_ to control now, then—

Her child self gives her a wicked smile, one that Gamora recognizes as the expression she wore whenever she got away with something sneaky in her youth.

“You finally understand the game now,” she says, biting back a laugh, but before Gamora can ask, the child fades away.

Something in Gamora seems to shift—a feeling of raw _power_ flows through her bloodstream—and she thinks to all the timeline jumping she did before, and realizes what she is truly capable of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is like a reverse movie script,, where the 2nd act is the shortest part whoops
> 
> once again we out here making up our own soul stone rules!!! yeah babey!!!!!!!


	3. i will never regret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wazzup y'all i'm Back for one more

Gamora waits.

The universe continues on from that fateful day, in the Terran year 2018, because she lets it.

She does not allow the dusted to return. She doesn’t raise a hand to the few pieces left on the board, in their absence.

For the first time, she sits back and watches the universe move on, trying to make sense of Thanos’ actions.

* * *

Within one Terran month, Thanos destroys the Soul Stone.

She feels it—feels a deep, shattering, _rift_ in her very being, but she still doesn’t budge, because Thanos may have destroyed _this_ _year’s_ Soul Stone…but not the ones of years’ past.

(Honestly, her mind struggles to comprehend it all, because she is mortal and _not_ meant to exist out of time with the stone, but there is no other way.)

But with the destruction of the stone came the destruction of her ability to leave it, to resurrect the dusted and live among them.

Part of her panics. This was a good move on his part.

But it’s not over. It can’t be.

She continues waiting.

* * *

What’s left of the Avengers—plus her sister and Rocket—track down Thanos to his garden and kill him, shortly after he destroys the stones.

This is not her victory; it’s quite the opposite, in fact. If Thanos is removed from the game, then the game itself is ended.

Thanos knows this. And the few times she feels his presence in the Soul World, she can detect his sneers and questions, reminding her this is another _loss_.

But, once again, she doesn’t budge.

* * *

In total, she waits five Terran years. 

It doesn’t feel like it in the Soul World. She lives out of time.

But that’s when things start getting interesting. 

* * *

The Avengers decide to use time travel to get the Infinity Stones. It's not a bad plan, considering it's, well, their _only_ plan, but Gamora already senses things will go south.

After all, only she knows the rules of the Soul Stone.

In practically every single past game, she's explained it to everyone, after returning to life with them.

But that never occurred this time around. So no live soul knows—not even Thanos, as the Thanos who _did_ know has already perished.

Somehow, they split their forces up in such a way that two specific Avengers with an established deep, intimate, personal bond are the ones tasked with retrieving the Soul Stone, and Gamora figures the faintest of echoes from past games have swayed everyone's thinking in that direction. 

* * *

 

She senses when the two Avengers in question arrive at Vormir and begin ascending the mountain.

She’s come to know each of the Avengers intimately over the…however many years it’s been, that she’s played this game.

Clint Barton. Also known as Hawkeye. He had a wife and family—all lost in the snap. Gamora usually gives them back to him. This time, she didn’t, and instead watched him turn to ruthless slaughter in his efforts to cope. She tells herself that when everything is over and she’s won, she will apologize to him personally.

Natasha Romanoff. Also known as the Black Widow. Gamora sees herself in her—a child stripped of her childhood, raised by monsters to kill others, for some grand purpose a child could never comprehend, but is expected to die for. Unlike Clint, Natasha channeled her grief into attempts to preserve whatever life left after Thanos, and even held out hope that the snap wasn’t the end. An impressive reaction, considering Natasha’s past. Gamora takes notes.

Both are lone wolves, from what Gamora’s observed. But both have learned to work in team settings and have given themselves up for those they consider family and friends.

* * *

On Vormir, a fight breaks out between the two of them for who must be sacrificed for the Soul Stone.

* * *

And Gamora knows it’s time to stop the game, then and there, because there's only one way this can end—a way she cannot, _will not_ condone, because no one deserves to know this life, the endless cycle. 

So, she stands, and says, “We have to reset."

But her child self doesn’t move.

* * *

Clint and Natasha teeter closer to the edge.

* * *

“No one else is supposed to die this way,” Gamora says, desperate.

Her child self just scrunches her nose, contemplating.

“We can stop this.” Gamora grabs her by her shoulders and shakes her. “Why won’t you stop this?”

“It’s a valid sacrifice,” she says.

* * *

Natasha hangs off the cliff, about to let go of Clint’s hand.

* * *

“She wanted nothing more than to be with her family again,” her child self continues. “She’s giving up that wish to _save_ them.”

Gamora releases the child, and tries to reset everything herself. She closes her eyes and concentrates, but…

“This is the key to victory,” the child says, and holds up a hand to Gamora.

Orange fills her vision and she falls.

* * *

Natasha Romanoff also falls.

* * *

Gamora comes to beside Natasha's body. She looks around, but her child self is nowhere in sight.

She looks down at Natasha, and finds herself feeling…numb.

Her mind’s racing with a lot of other things—grief, guilt, anger, confusion.

But in her heart…nothing.

Because this is the first time she won’t be alone in many years.

It’s a strange pill to swallow. Too many emotions to feel at once. 

Instead, Gamora thinks back to the countless games she spent working closely with Natasha, plotting against her father. She recalls how intimately they came to knew each other, fellow children of monsters who stole them away from their homes and the childhoods they deserved to use them for their own agendas. Where Peter and the other Guardians couldn’t quite understand Gamora’s past trauma, Natasha was there, reminiscing in her own experiences that left her struggling to do what little good she could do in her world.

She thinks back to the child’s—the _stone’s_ —face, curious and ruthless and unwilling to prevent this tragedy.

Only then does it hit her, and she cries out, over Natasha’s unconscious body, for the second life to be saved, but ruined, by the Soul Stone and its games.

* * *

Sometime later, Natasha slowly sits up and look around, expression hesitant.

“Hello,” Gamora says calmly from behind her, trying to maintain a relaxed, yet still defensive, stance, in case she attacks, because this Natasha will not recognize her, and the realization hurts Gamora more than she thought it could. “You’re the one they call Widow."

Natasha looks unsure of what to make of Gamora. “Who’s ‘they’?”

“Anyone. Everyone.” Gamora almost smiles. “You’re one of the most dangerous women in the galaxy.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“You should,” Gamora says. “Because they call me the _most_ dangerous woman in the galaxy.”

Natasha’s eyes dart around her quickly, and her hands move to where Gamora knows her weapons would normally be. “Who are you? And where the hell are we?”

“My name is Gamora,” she says, slowly. “And this is the Soul World.”

* * *

Natasha calms down fairly quickly after that, once it’s clear Gamora doesn’t pose an actual threat. She paces around a bit, trying to work everything out in her head. Gamora watches.

“What do you last remember?” Gamora asks.

“I remember…going to space. No, not just space—time travel. With…” Natasha pauses. “Clint. Oh my God.”

“He’s fine,” Gamora says.

“The Soul Stone…did he get it?”

Gamora can feel him carrying the stone—carrying them—back to the rest of his team, heart heavy with grief. “At your expense.”

“It had to be done,” Natasha says, boldly, without any hesitation. “Whatever it takes to bring everyone back. And stop that purple son of a bitch.”

Gamora wonders just how far Natasha is willing to take this "whatever" to save the universe.

* * *

They watch the rest of the timeline play out together, and the Avengers try to gather up the rest of the Stones to reverse Thanos’ snap. Banner snaps his fingers with his own Infinity Gauntlet, and the world around Gamora and Natasha practically comes undone.

Suddenly, Gamora feels the souls of the dusted leave all at once.

It’s a strange feeling—one she’s never had before, as the typical gatekeeper of the souls, controlling when they’re released.

Now someone else has taken over the controls. 

“I can’t believe we just,” Natasha pauses, gesturing vaguely. “We just _sit here?_ ”

“There isn’t much else we can do,” Gamora says.

“I don’t like it.”

Gamora doesn’t reply.

* * *

Sure enough, the Avengers triumph against Thanos again— _for real_ , this time. It may be a Thanos who doesn’t know what’s to come, yet, regarding the stones and the snap and most definitely not their _game_ , but it’s something.

And then Steve Rogers goes back in time to return the Soul Stone, because he's an honorable man Gamora's come to respect but question, and Natasha no longer owes a debt.

She’s a free woman.

“Come with me,” she begs Gamora.

“I can’t.”

“You have someone—your _family_ —all waiting for you,” Natasha points out, as if Gamora has a choice in the matter. She bites back a cutting reply that would’ve reminded Natasha of the fact.

Gamora settles for, “So do you.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Natasha insists, and Gamora swallows back the sudden urge to cry.

“You have to,” she says.

“I’ll come back for you.”

“Natasha—“

“I’ll—I’m gonna figure it out,” Natasha says. “I swear. I will. I’m coming back.”

Natasha fades completely then. Gamora wipes a stray tear from her eye.

“Yes,” she whispers. “You will.”

* * *

This is not her victory, nor does she believe it’s the most victorious outcome for the people she’s come to love and admire after countless games who have no memory of her nor any knowledge of her power.

She can get them a better ending—get _everyone_ a better ending.

So, she resets.

* * *

This time, after the snap occurs and the dust settles, a familiar face joins her in the interim.

“Why am I here?” Natasha asks. “What—where…?”

“Just give it a moment,” Gamora says calmly. “It’ll come back to you.”

As it does, Gamora watches Natasha’s face embark on a journey of expressions, visualizing her mental process, before Natasha finally settles for a soft, “What the _fuck?_ ”

“You're back in the Soul World,” Gamora says, an echo of their first meeting. “And you can now wield the power of the Soul Stone. With me. To defeat Thanos.”

Natasha blinks. She looks like she’s about to say something, raising a hand and opening her mouth.

Then she turns abruptly and walks away.

Gamora takes a few steps after her. “Where are you going?”

“Somewhere. I don’t know. Anywhere.” Natasha continues walking. “Just. Not here.”

Gamora watches her walk until she fades into the orange hues, only for Natasha to reappear on the opposite side of where she’d walked to, now walking toward Gamora.

“There is nowhere _but_ here,” Gamora says.

Natasha stops. “This is above my pay grade.”

It's a shitty fate that Gamora doesn't know how to justify. But a selfish part of her relishes in the fact that she won't have to do this alone anymore.

So, Gamora gestures to a nearby pillar, and moves to sit down. "We have a lot to catch up on."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OH SHITTTTT we here now...yeehaw 
> 
> uhhhh idk what my work schedule for this is exactly but i'm gonna #try to actually finish this series of stories?? wish me luck lmao
> 
> in the meantime, catch me on tumblr at [@crazyrichfilipinos](https://crazyrichfilipinos.tumblr.com/)


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